When the bombardments and strafing began, I was told to crouch beside
a tree trunk and, whatever I did, not to move. They shot at anything that
moved.

During the first four days about fifteen women and children were wounded,
shrapnel was removed and amputations were performed with absolutely no
pain medicine. The government troops encircling us were pressing in on
foot, killing whomever they encountered.

On the fourth night we found ourselves running along a rocky path when
we reached the government's line of fire. The babies the women were carrying
began shrieking at the noise of the shooting and as soon as we got within
earshot of the government soldiers they turned their fire on us.

It was pandemonium, grenades were landing all around; machine guns were
firing; we were running; stumbling; falling; trying to make it through
the barrage of bullets and shrapnel. A little boy about 20 yards ahead
of me was blown in half when a grenade landed on him. His body lay in
the middle of the narrow path. I had to run right over him to escape.

[Washington Post, December 28, 1982]

In the first 13 months I spent in Spanish Harlem I witnessed:

- A deadly shooting, outside my window, of the mother of a 3-year old
child, by an assailant wielding a sawed-off shotgun.

- A bombing and a machine-gunning of a numbers joint, once again within
view of my apartment window.

- A shoot-out and a police-car chase scene in front of a pizza parlor
where I happened to be eating a snack.

- The aftermath of the firebombing of a heroin house.

- A dozen screaming, clothes-ripping fights.

- Almost daily exposure to broken-down human beings, some of them in
fits of crack-induced paranoia, some suffering from delirium tremens,
and others in unidentifiable pathological fits screaming and shouting
insults to all around them.

Perhaps the most poignant expression of the pervasiveness of the culture
of terror was the comment made to me by a 13-year-old boy in the course
of an otherwise innocuous conversation about how his mothers pregnancy
was going. He told me he hoped his mother would give birth to a boy because
girls are too easy to rape.

[New York Times Magazine, November 12, 1989]

These paragraphs are excerpted from newspaper pieces that I
wrote in the 1980s to call attention to violence in two very different settings
where I was then conducting fieldwork: the first is among revolutionary peasants
in rural El Salvador and the second among second-generation Puerto Rican crack
dealers in East Harlem, New York City. Moving from one site to the next, I became
interested in differentiating the forms and meanings assumed by violence in
war and peace in order to document the ways in which it either challenges or
buttresses inequalities of power. In the revolutionary setting of El Salvador,
I was eager to document the effective capacity of the dominated to resist state
repression while, in the United States, I struggled to explain the politically
demobilizing effect of interpersonal conflict and self-destruction that suffuses
life in the inner city. Over a decade later, spurred by the spread of deregulated
capitalism across the globe, I return to these 1980s accounts of violence with
additional ethnographic observations in both El Salvador and the U.S. inner
city to suggest that the political context in which I was operating then deeply
affected what I was able to document empirically and analyze theoretically.
In Central America, I labored under an unconscious Cold-War imperative that
led me to sanitize my depictions of political violence and repression among
revolutionary peasants. On a theoretical level, this obscured the multi-sided
character of violence and the commonalities among its various subtypes of violence
across historical, cultural, and political settings. Most importantly, my Cold-War
lenses led me to underreport and misrecognize the power of violence to buttress
patterns of social inequality in the publics eye and to de-politicize
attempts to oppose oppression in war-time El Salvador. By contrast, in the racialized
urban core of the United States, I was able to critique the demobilizing effects
of everyday violence by showing how it resulted from the internalization of
historically entrenched structural violence as expressed in a banalized maelstrom
of interpersonal and delinquent aggression.

To unravel the interrelated strands of violence that complicated
my understanding of revolutionary El Salvador as compared to the declining U.S.
inner city, I have found it useful to distinguish between four types of violence,
namely political, structural, symbolic, everyday violence (see Chart 1). I am
limiting the term political violence to violence directly and purposefully
administered in the name of a political ideology, movement, or state such as
the physical repression of dissent by the army or the police as well as its
converse, popular armed struggle against a repressive regime. Structural
violence refers to the political-economic organization of society that imposes
conditions of physical and emotional distress, from high morbidity and mortality
rates to poverty and abusive working conditions. It is rooted, at the macro-level,
in structures such as unequal international terms of trade and it is expressed
locally in exploitative labor markets, marketing arrangements and the monopolization
of services. The term was first defined in academic circles by the founder of
the field of Peace and Conflict Studies, Johan Galtung (1969), to highlight
a social-democratic commitment to universal human rights1 and to rebuff the anti-communist
hysteria propagated by U.S.-style capitalism during the Cold War that resulted
in the political repression of popular dissent throughout the non-industrialized
world. Structural violence also has radical roots in anti-colonial resistance
movements (Fanon, 1963) and in Catholic liberation theologys advocacy
for a preferential option for the poor (Camara, 1971; CELAM, 1973;
Martin-Baro, 1994). Most recently, the concept has been used by medical anthropologists
to highlight the ways extreme economic inequalities promote disease and social
suffering (Farmer, 1999 and 2000). The concept of symbolic violence was
developed by Pierre Bourdieu to uncover how domination operates on an intimate
level via the misrecognition of power structures on the part of the dominated
who collude in their own oppression every time they perceive and judge the social
order through categories that make it appear natural and self-evident (Bourdieu
and Wacquant, 1992: 162-173, 200-205).

Chart 1

Differentiating Forms and Expressions of Violence

Direct Political: Targeted physical violence and terror
administered by official authorities and those opposing it, such as military
repression, police torture, and armed resistance.

Structural: Chronic, historically-entrenched political-economic
oppression and social inequality, ranging from exploitative international
terms of trade to abusive local working conditions and high infant mortality
rates. Term brought into academic debates by Galtung (1969, 1975).

Symbolic: Defined in Bourdieus (1997) work as the
internalized humiliations and legitimations of inequality and hierarchy
ranging from sexism and racism to intimate expressions of class power.
It is exercised through cognition and misrecognition, knowledge
and sentiment, with the unwitting consent of the dominated (Bourdieu,
2001; see also Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 162-173, 200-205).

Everyday: Daily practices and expressions of violence on
a micro-interactional level: interpersonal, domestic and delinquent. Concept
adapted from Scheper-Hughes (1992, 1996) to focus on the individual lived
experience that normalizes petty brutalities and terror at the community
level and creates a commonsense or ethos of violence.

The concept of everyday violence has been most eloquently
developed by Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1992, 1996, 1997) to call attention on a
more phenomenological level to the peace-time crimes, the small
wars and invisible genocides that plague the poor around the world. Her
usage of the term, however, tends to conflate everyday violence with structural
and institutional violence. I find it more useful to limit the notion to the
routine practices and expressions of interpersonal aggression that serve to
normalize violence at the microlevel such as domestic, delinquent and sexual
conflict, and even substance abuse. The analytic import of the term is to prevent
explaining away individual-level confrontations by psychological or individualistic
approaches that blame the victims. My narrower definition is also geared to
depict how everyday violence can grow and coalesce into a culture of terrorto
invoke Taussig (1987)that establishes a commonsense normalizing violence
in the public and private spheres alike. The reinterpretation of my ethnographic
data that follows will show how, in revolutionary El Salvador, I was unable
to recognize the distinctiveness of everyday violence and therefore to discern
it as a product of political and structural violence, even though I had understood
it at the interface of structural and symbolic violence in the U.S. inner city.

The Cold-War Politics of Representation in El Salvador

The opening vignette depicting the military suppression of revolutionary peasants
in El Salvador was written in 1981 during the final escalation of the Cold War.
El Salvador was then in the midst of a civil war pitting a right-wing military
government to a coalition of socialist guerilla organizations known as the Farabundo
Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). For most of the twentieth century the
United States had invoked a rhetoric of defending the free world from communism
to justify supporting a succession of military regimes in the country. These
governments promoted the economic and political interests of a small coffee-producing
oligarchy known popularly as the fourteen families and notorious
for their systematic human rights violations. Over 75,000 Salvadorans, primarily
civilians, died during the 1980s as a result of state repression of the FMLN
guerillas and their sympathizers. At the time of my fieldwork, an average of
almost 800 people were being killed every month by the Salvadoran military and
its affiliated death squads (Americas Watch, 1985; United Nations, 1993). During
this period, the government depended upon U.S. military, political, and economic
support for its survival, receiving a total of over 4 billion dollars during
the 1980s, more than any other nation except Egypt and Israel (Wallace, 2000).

This Salvadoran vignette was based on an aborted dissertation project proposing
to examine the mobilization of Salvadoran peasants on both sides of the civil
war. To conduct this research, I had entered a conflict-ridden rural region
where most of the population actively supported the FMLN guerilla fighters.
Two days after arrival, I found myself caught with the local residents in the
middle of a government scorched-earth campaign. Army troops surrounded and carried
out aerial bombardment of a forty-square mile region that was home to a dozen
pro-FMLN small-farmer villages. They followed up with infantry destroying as
much of the infrastructure as possiblecrops, livestock, housesand
killing and sometimes torturing the people they captured. Alongside the civilian
population of approximately one thousand peasants, I ran for my life for fourteen
days before finally reaching safety as a refugee in neighboring Honduras. Accompanied
by no more than a hundred armed FMLN fighters, we hid during the day and fled
at night. The guerillas, most of whom were born and raised in the area, moved
along our flanks in an attempt to protect us, but we were continually strafed,
bombed and pursued by the Salvadoran militarys airplanes, helicopters,
and ground troops. Government soldiers were guided by especially brutal paramilitary
fighters recruited from among the neighboring villagers.2

At the time, it appeared to me that state repression of the
civilian population was backfiring. I thought that the pain, fear, and anguish
caused by the military campaign was strengthening the ideological and emotional
commitment of the civilian population to rebellion, in short, that repression
was radicalizing the marginalized small farmers. I interpreted the latters
mobilization into armed struggle to be socially as well as individually liberatingmuch
as Franz Fanon (1963) and Sartre (1963) had celebrated the anti-colonial war
of Algerians against France. The Salvadoran peasants were then organizing around
an ideology that syncretized catholic liberation theology, Marxist class struggle,
romantic socialist populism and, finally, social vengeance and personal dignity
(Bourgois, 1982a). Most significant to me at the time was the quasi-messianic
quality of their rejection of humiliation and exploitation by landlords and
the rural paramilitaries. It seemed to me then that they were inverting a symbolic
violence that, for generations, had naturalized the abuse of dark-skinned, illiterate
campesinos. I described the Salvadoran peasants as metamorphosing,

from being the most despised creatures on earth (i.e., landless or land-poor
laborers, giving obligatory days worth of labor to overbearing landowners)
to becoming the leaders of history: the people the Bible prophesizes about.
They felt honored to die for their cause because before its advent they had
been half deadand it hurt. (Bourgois, 1982a: 24)

My fieldwork notes from the days just prior to the military
invasion in 1981 report that a surprisingly high number of the Salvadoran guerilla
fighters had repented past histories of alcoholism and domestic violence.3 In
a politically engaged article published at the height of the war, I quoted the
emblematic words of one guerilla fighter: We used to be machista.
We used to put away a lotta drink and cut each other up. But then the Organization
showed us the way, and weve channeled that violence for the benefit of
the people (Bourgois, 1982a: 24-25).

The Neo-Liberal Politics of Representation in El Barrio,
USA

In contrast to what I took to be the liberating dynamic of political violence
in El Salvador, I understood the everyday violence that pervades the U.S. inner
city described in the second opening vignette as strictly oppressive and demobilizing.
In the late 1980s, I spent nearly five years living in a tenement with my family
next to a crackhouse in East Harlem, New York City. There, I befriended a group
of Puerto Rican street-level crack dealers, reconstructed their life stories
and observed their daily struggles for sustenance and self-respect. The frequent
beatings and periodic shootings and stabbings between the young men I spent
most of my time with, and the ongoing fracas within their families, was more
challenging for me to analyze theoretically and politically than the violence
of wartime El Salvador. The crack commerce scene offered a windows onto the
mechanisms whereby structural and symbolic violence fuse to translate into everyday
violence: extreme segregation, social inequality and material misery are expressed
at ground level in interpersonal conflicts that the socially vulnerable inflict
mainly onto themselves (via substance abuse), onto their kin and friends (through
domestic violence and adolescent gang rape), and onto their neighbors and community
(with burglaries, robberies, assaults, drive-by shootings, etc.). The result
is a localized culture of terror, (Taussig 1987), or a heightened
level of everyday violence that enforces the boundaries of what I call U.S.
urban apartheid (Bourgois, 1995).

As a member of the dominant culture and class in the United States, I worried
about the political as well as scholarly implications of my ethnographic depiction
of Puerto-Rican crack dealers. I feared contributing to a pornography
of violence that submerges the structural causes of urban destitution
under lurid details of blood, aggression, and gore. As noted long ago by Laura
Nader (1972), anthropological accounts based on participant observation among
the powerless risk publicly humiliating them. This is especially true in the
context of the hegemonic U.S. neo-liberal ideology that, by definition, considers
the poor as morally suspect. Yet I was theoretically and politically committed
to fully documenting the ramifying social suffering caused by extreme social
and economic marginality in East Harlem. This quandary encouraged me to focus
on structural violence and later symbolic violence, which by definition shift
attention onto the broader, macro-level, power inequalities that condition everyday
violence.

By the end of my sojourn in East Harlem, just as the Cold War was coming to
a close, I presented a paper at a session of the American Anthropological Association
in which I attempted to compare patterns and experiences of violence in war-torn
rural El Salvador and the peacetime U.S. inner city (Bourgois, 1992). In highlighting
the difference between direct political violence and invisible structural violence
in that paper, I thought I was transcending Cold War ideology, but instead I
merely mimicked it. For, throughout my analysis, I maintained a moral opposition
between worthy political violence that rallies the subordinate in
the face of repression by an authoritarian state versus unworthy
violence that confuses and demobilizes the socially vulnerable in neo-liberal
democratic societies. My concern with differentiating good from bad violence,
and for separating out politically progressive from self-destructive and irresponsible
violence blinded me to the profoundly disabling nature of political violence
in Central America. Specifically, I failed to see how political repression and
resistance in wartime reverberate in a dynamic of everyday violence akin to
that produced by the fusing of structural and symbolic violence during peacetime.

Instead, I constructed a Gramscian-inspired explanation for why the guerilla
experience of repressive political violence in El Salvador could be interpreted
as humanly uplifting and politically liberating through the physical pain and
anger it generated. I opposed that dynamic to the everyday acts of violence
that I had witnessed in East Harlem, which I interpreted as the expression of
false consciousness in a structurally and symbolically oppressive society that
no longer needs to wield political violence to buttress structures of inequality.
Gramscis theory of hegemony is a valuable tool but the ways in which I
categorized violence as worthy versus unworthy in that paper directly shaped
what I was able to see, hear and believe; what I interpreted as data
and what I took fieldwork notes on; and which debates I viewed as pertinent
and sought to engage. On an empirical level, whereas I amply documented the
range of suffering caused by structural and symbolic violence in a socially
polarized society during peacetime, I oversimplified and understated the ramifications
of terror in a repressive society torn by civil war.

Rewriting field notes from the Salvadoran Civil War

Referring back to the opening vignette, I can still vividly remember that night
of November 14, 1981, when I found myself running through the militarys
line of fire with about one thousand terrified men, women and children. I have
a different vocabulary to describe the victims, however. For example, I might
now refer to the mutilated little boy writhing in front of me with
his torso severed as a teenage fighter, since he was carrying an
automatic weapon even though he was no more than fourteen years old. The political
strictures of the Cold War, however, made it important, indeed imperative, to
label him little boy rather than teenage fighter, because,
in the martial vision of that conflict prevalent in the early eighties, adolescents
carrying automatic weapons deserved to be killed. The human pathos of a child
dying in face-to-face combat while defending his family from marauding government
soldiers would have been missed.

PHOTO 1: A teenager takes a break from the fighting to
play with his baby brother hiding in the thickets.

More subtly, and perhaps more importantly, I have different
memories of the moments before I ran over the body of that boy fighter. I rewrote
an ex-post-facto fieldwork excerpts eighteen years after the fact emphasizing
what I now remember. When I prepared the original newspaper piece in 1981, I
had not been able to fully remember or analyze these events. Perhaps I thought
these details were unimportant. Once again, in the context of the Cold War,
my primary concern was to spotlight the more objectionable power vectors aimed
at small farmers in El Salvador, namely, the repressive military regime maintained
by U.S. foreign policy. I may also have omitted these memories from my fieldnotes
because I sensed that they might reveal a personal character flaw on my part:

When the grenade landed on the teenage fighter up ahead, I dove into the
dirt behind some bushes. I accidentally jostled a young mother who was already
crouching behind the bushes where I landed. I startled her six-month-old baby
and it began to cry. With me panting next to them, huge, foreign, and stinking
of strange sweat and panic, the baby's cries spiraled into wailing shrieks.

The mother hissed in my ear, "¡Vete! ¡Vete de aquí!
¡Rápido! [Get out of here! Scram!]. At first, shocked, I thought
she was angry at me and was being cruel, pushing me off into the hail of bullets.
Suddenly, it dawned on me that she was trying to save my life: her babys
cries were beginning to cut through the sound of the gunfire. I jumped to
my feet and sprinted forward, just as another barrage of machine guns fired
into the shrieks of mothers and babies behind me.

This was my first participant-observation exposure to the kind of human betrayal
that survivors commit in counter-insurgency warfare. Making a baby cry and then
running from it when one realizes that those cries will attract gunfire forced
me to fail my own sense of human dignity, and masculinity and to question my
self-esteem. It also bordered on symbolic violence by causing me to be angry
at both myself and the FMLN for making the civilians the target of government
repression.

I do not know for sure if the mother and baby died in the
bullets directed at the infants cries. I suspect that they were both killed.
Had I not startled that baby, it would have turned twenty as this article goes
to press. Maybe if I had been smarter and sprinted away sooner when the baby's
mother begged me to, then the infants wailing would not have escalated
into shrieking and the government soldiers may not have heard it. A decade later,
conversations with guerilla fighters and their families demonstrate that those
kinds of blames and feelings of betrayal over human failures abound in counterinsurgency
warfare. They are an inevitable part of surviving military repression and they
contribute to a form of symbolic violence whereby survivors focus their recriminations
on their fellow victims as well as their own character flaws, rather than
on the agents who actually perpetrated terror. The result is often a traumatized
silencing of the brutal events by witnesses who blame themselves for what they
had to do to survive.

During that same night when we ran through the government troops encircling
us, I passed parents and older siblings stumbling under the weight of terrified
children or wounded family members. I wondered as I fled if I was supposed to
stop and do something to help them. Convinced that we were all going to die,
I ran for my life feeling that I was betraying those left behind.

PHOTO 2: Camouflaged on the bottom of a ravine at daybreak
following our escape through the line of fire.

As dawn rose, most of us managed to reassemble at the bottom of a ravine to
hide together. We hoped that the guerilla fighters might be able to offer us
some protection and we prayed that the government helicopters and ground troops
combing the area not find us. As my photograph from that moment illustrates,
a few well-aimed grenades or rounds of automatic fire directed into our hiding
place would have sufficed to kill several hundreds of us. Luckily, when a helicopter
did fly over the ravine, only a couple dozen feet immediately above us, it strafed
the fighters who had stationed themselves on the hillside and it failed to detect
us. The guerillas above us dispersed rapidly and successfully drew the enemy
fire away from us.

After the close encounter with the helicopter, I found myself next to a family
trying to calm a nineteen-day-old baby whose mother had been killed by a grenade
as she ran through the gunfire a few hours earlier. They asked me to photograph
them to document their story. The newborn had been thrown from her mothers
arms unharmed by the explosion and was picked up in the chaos by her aunt. The
surviving family members had nothing to feed the crying newborn and could only
rock her.

PHOTO 3: The mother of this baby had just been killed
by grenade shrapnel. The surviving family members did not have a bottle to feed
the nineteen-day-old infant and we were scared that the noise of the babys
cries was going to reveal our location to the government troops.

For the next eight days almost one thousand of us stayed close together, striving
to minimize our noise at night as we moved to new hiding places and scavenged
for food in the underbrush. On several occasions, we were spotted by Salvadoran
troops and strafed by U.S.-supplied gunships or chased by ground patrols. Each
time we ran as fast as possible to hide behind trees or boulders, hoping that
those carrying weapons were decoying the enemy away from us.

Thus it was the young, healthy and fleet-footed who had the best chance of surviving.
At sunset, on the eighth day of our flight (twelfth day after the start of the
attack), under particularly heavy bombardment, I found myself chasing after
a small group of men who appeared to know their way. Most of them were fighters
who had thrown away the guns with which they were supposed to be protecting
their families. Instead, we ran fast all night in what felt like selfish terror.
Further and further behind us, we could hear the sounds of crying children drawing
the bulk of the fire. We escaped alive as refugees into neighboring Honduras
before the sun rose and listened for the rest of the day as government helicopters
blasted the slower moving, noisy mass of civilians we had left behind. If my
companions from that final night of flight survived until the end of the war,
they likely still feel survivor guilt today.4

Throughout the civil war, U.S. and Salvadoran government propaganda denounced
the guerillas for hiding amidst the civilians and thereby causing them to be
killed in the crossfire. The FMLN leadership itself was divided over its policy
of encouragingand at times demandingcivilians and family members
of fighters to remain in the war zones. Spouses were often in bitter disagreement
over this issue. In retrospect, mothers sometimes hold husbands responsible
for the death of their children because the latter insisted on remaining in
their home village to support the FMLN. By 1983, a little over a year after
this scorched-earth campaign, the guerillas changed their tactics and evacuated
the majority of non-fighters from the most actively contested war zones. The
point here is that the boundary between protector and coward is often ambiguous
and inconsistent in counterinsurgency warfare. Once again, such a liminal
space of death (Taussig, 1987) or gray zone (Levi, 1986) obfuscates
responsibility from those primarily responsible for the terrorin this
case the U.S.-trained and supported Salvadoran military. Instead, the snares
of symbolic violencein the form of confusing feelings of inadequacy, guilt,
and mutual recriminationsdeflect attention away from the repressive political
violence that created the conditions of terror, which imposed a bitter choice
between survival and betrayal.

Violence in War and Peace

During the summer of 1994, with the Cold War over, I revisited the same resettled
villages of guerilla fighters and supporters where I had been trapped during
the military attack of 1981. Most immediately tangible was the silent brutality
of economic oppression. My first set of field notes from that visit describe
the intersection of the scars of structural and political violence on the local
ecology and the bodies of residents:

July, 1994

Due to land scarcity the villagers are forced to farm steep, rocky terrain.
As if to add insult to injury, badly healed wounds from the war make it difficult
for many of the young men to even hobble up to their awkwardly pitched milpas
[plots]. Even the earth appears disabled and angry: carved by rivulets of
runoff from exposure to the heavy rain and pockmarked by sharp protruding
stones.

Tito, the son of the woman whose house we are staying in, fought for almost
ten years with the FMLN. Now, he limps up the incline to the eroded hillside
where he tries to scrape together a crop of corn and sorghum with only his
machete and a digging stick. He uses his digging stick as a cane to keep from
falling in his field, and he occasionally grimaces from the shrapnel still
lodged in his calf and knee.

No one is particularly sympathetic to Tito, however, because he now has
an alcohol problem. It is whispered that he was not a particularly brave fighter
during the war.

I had hoped that this return visit would be a cathartic reunion with the people
I had bonded with during the fourteen-day military raid of 1981. It turned out
to be an awkward and at times disillusioning experience of tip-toeing around
minefields of misdeeds, deception and disloyalty. My friends insisted upon telling
me about what military mistakes had been made; which wounded person had been
abandoned and left to the enemy; that a particular undersized and cognitively
challenged child had been permanently damaged by the five-pill valium overdose
given to him by his mother to quiet his crying during the flight; which fighters
had deserted; how it felt to shoot a friend in the head when he was wounded
so that the enemy would not capture and torture him into revealing the identity
and location of guerillas; how it felt to be a father who forced his scared
fourteen-year-old son to join the guerilla only have him killed by airborne
gattling guns in his very first sortie. Thirteen years after the armistice,
my closest friend, José, was troubled by the fact that he has planted
over 150 homemade land mines on the hillside paths leading to his guerilla encampment.
He was convinced that most of these mines had mutilated a soldiers foot,
and that his former enemies were now hobbling up and down a steep hillside in
a neighboring village, trying to eke out a harvest of corn to keep their families
alive, just as he and his father were.

The notes from my first day of fieldwork also include a description of the infected
cut on the foot of Titos 10-year-old little brother. Ridden with fever,
he moaned listlessly in a hammock in the house of the family sheltering me.
There was no access to medical care in the entire region. I feared that this
little boy was going to die from blood poisoning due to this simple cut. But
he survived and five years later, in 1999, I learned that he killed Tito whose
alcoholism had escalated. At the murder trial of her fifteen-year-old, the mother,
who had lost her husband during the civil war to military repression, begged
the judgeunsuccessfullynot to incarcerate the only surviving male
of her household: she beseeched mercy on grounds that the teenager had only
tried to protect her from her oldest son Tito who beat her savagely when he
drank too much.

One of the most disturbing stories I collected during this return visit was
that of a mother who suffocated two of her infants while hiding in a cave with
a dozen other villagers. They had not followed us during the night when we broke
through the government troops surrounding us. Fearing that the Salvadoran military
would otherwise detect their presence, her companions gave her the choice of
either leaving the cave or stuffing rags into the mouths of her hysterically
crying children. Over a decade later, there was disagreement over whether the
father was justified in subsequently abandoning the mother for killing their
two offspring. Some hailed the mother as a hero for having chosen to sacrifice
her babies in an attempt to safeguard the lives of her companions in the cave.
It was taken for granted that she would have been captured, had she left the
cave with her crying children, and under torture she likely would have revealed
the location of her hidden companions. Nevertheless, years later, doubts persist
over the moral worth of the hapless mother, yet again blurring the boundary
between hero and villain in counterinsurgency war.

The question, too painful to ask, that was raised implicitly in most of my conversations
during this visit revolved around whether all the suffering and violence of
the guerilla struggle had been in vain?5 Merely posing the question in the context
of the continuing structural violence endured by the former fighters and their
families felt like an insult. Their uncertain, often ambiguous, retrospective
responses concerning the validity of their struggle implied a self-critique:
the irresponsibility and naiveté of subjecting themselves and their families
to political violence in support of the FMLN. This questioning of the utility
of past sacrifices fostered apolitical isolation and mutual distrust. Nonetheless,
most of the ex-guerillas and their kin in this region still upheld many of the
core ideals of what they now called the War rather than the
Revolution. Through the remainder of the 1990s, they have consistently
voted for former FMLN candidates in both local and national elections.6 In contrast
to what I had thought I observed in 1981, however, they did not consider their
mobilization into armed struggle to be empowering or liberating. Although, they
were generally proud at having supported the guerilla struggle, at the same
time they felt betrayed by the leadership. This frequently slid into a self-deprecating
sense of having been duped. Hence, my final fieldwork note from that 1994 sojourn:

Yet once again, a bunch of petty-bourgeois intellectuals on a power-trip
fantasy of revolution mobilized thousands of peasants to kill and betray one
another, only to drop them later like hot potatoes when the going got tough
and boring.

Of course, the wisdom of hindsight allows one to see clearly how the revolutionary
movement in El Salvador was traumatized and distorted by the very violence it
was organizing against. Through an almost mimetic process, the governments
brutality was transposed into the guerillas organizational structures
and internal relations, as violence became a banal instrumental necessity. There
are several well-known prominent examples of internecine killings within the
FMLN leadership. Most famously, Roque Dalton, El Salvadors most famous
poet, was killed by the guerilla organization he belonged to in the 1970s for
being a revisionist, a disagreement in political strategy with respect
to the utility and timing of engaging in armed struggle.7 In the mid 1980s, the
woman who was the second-in-command of one of the largest guerilla factions
within the FMLN coalition was killed in a leadership dispute over a strategy
of continued armed struggle versus negotiation. She was reportedly stabbed 68
times by the bodyguard of Cayetano Carpio, the head of her faction, who himself
is believed to have committed suicide in Nicaragua a few months later, after
the assassination was finally made public. The normalization of internecine
violence in the broader context of political violence makes sense if the extent
of the pain and terror that political repression causes is fully appreciated
as a pressure cooker generating everyday violence through the systematic
distortion of social relations and sensibilities. It also helps explain why
El Salvador had the highest per capita homicide rate in the western hemisphere
during the 1990s after the end of the Civil War. In point of fact, more Salvadorans
have been killed by criminal violence during the decade following the peace
accords on New Years Eve of 1991, than died during the last ten years
of the war: 6,250 per year perished during the 1980s as against 8,700 to 11,000
killed every year during the 1990s (DeCesare, 1998:23-4; Wallace, 2000).

Gendering the Mesh of Violence

PHOTO 4: Carmen wounded in her lower spine, hides in
a dry streambed and jokes with the medical technician next to her about eating
the land crab he just caught.

During the 1981 military operation a seventeen year-old woman named Carmen asked
me to photograph her in one of our hiding places. She smiled for the benefit
of my camera, belying the fact that the Salvadoran military had been bombing
the hills of the canyon where we were hiding only a few hours earlier. Carmen
had been hit by shrapnel in her lower back while defending one of the trenches
blocking the entrance to her village on the third day of fighting and she was
in a great deal of pain. Incapable of walking, her family carried her in a hammock
during our night flights. That is why she is alive today. In the two decades
since this picture was taken Carmen has had five children and despite -- or
because -- of several surgeries to remove the shrapnel in her lower spine she
suffers from chronic back pain, migraines, and ulcers. In 1997, she entered
California overland from Mexico as an undocumented migrant.

Carmens first job in the United States was as a salesperson in a discount
shop in San Francisco's Latino Mission District at a pay of $2.38 an hour for
10-hour-long days. Despite her back pain, she was periodically rebuked by her
employer for sitting down or taking a lunch break. Initially, Carmen was not
granted political asylum in the United States and her "illegal alien"
status facilitated her economic exploitation. Subsequently, she obtained temporary
political status and found a job ironing for $6 an hour in a garment sweatshop
established by new immigrants. Within a year, she was diagnosed with repetitive
strain injury in her shoulder from the ironing and was fired. I helped her threaten
the employer with a lawsuit and she was rehired on a different position, sewing
in the same factory, but her new task still hurts her tendons whose inside sheaths
have been permanently scarreda medical condition known as tenosynovitis.
Carmen also owes over a thousand dollars in bills to the county hospital. She
is paying these bills on an installment plan because she fears that defaulting
might jeopardize her application for permanent residency. She cannot petition
for legal visas for her five children to immigrate until the United States grants
her a green card. In other words, she is enmeshed in the structural
violence of a global sweatshop economy that is accentuated by her gendered vulnerability
as a mother separated from her children.

Carmen was an M-16-carrying fighter for almost two years during
the war, as well as a civilian supporter of the FMLN for over a decade. Yet,
unlike most other male fighters in her village, despite being the single mother
of five children, she was not granted any land after the signing of the peace
treaty. I had thought that Carmen was excluded from land redistribution because
she was a woman and had been in a minority political faction of the guerilla
organization in her village. Indeed, that is what Carmen had told me at first
to be polite. Later, in private, she presented a more complex and disturbing
picture of why she was landless. Her story adds a crucial gender dynamic to
the way political, structural and symbolic violence mesh and become expressed
as everyday violence at the interpersonal level. Carmen revealed that her problem
revolved around a love affair of her oldest brother that had turned sour. He
was a jefe de escuadra (leader of a squad of six guerilla
fighters) and his girlfriend had jilted him in favor of the local FMLN commander.
The latter feared her brother might kill him or betray the guerilla encampment
where he was based to spite him. Consequently he ordered the murder of Carmens
brother. Carmens nephew, who witnessed the execution, reports:

He was sleeping. They came and woke him up. He told them, "Compañeros,
no, no, don't kill me. I've fought and I have defended many compañeros."
He told them, "And I have recuperated lots of weapons. You see
he was the head of a squad. He was a valiant man, very respected in the zone.
But they assassinated him.

Stories of internal killings over sexual jealousy were not run-of-the-mill in
the FMLN but they would not surprise anyone close to the everyday reality of
guerilla struggles. A veteran fighter can excuse the commander for having killed
Carmen's brother because it is plausible that, in his heartbreak over losing
his love, Carmen's brother might indeed have murdered his commander or denounced
the location of the guerilla encampment to the military authorities and endangered
dozens of fighters. Romantic jealousy results in comrades-in-arms killing one
another over mere suspicions. The normalization of violence during wartime El
Salvador made it appear necessary to kill Carmens brother. Fifteen years
later, Carmen was still debating whether or not her brother had been a risk
to the guerillas. Note the defensiveness with which she describes her familys
right to mourn and condemn his murder. Note also how the killing is ultimately
blamed on the promiscuity and machinations of the girlfriend, rather than an
abuse of power by the local FMLN commander:

People are sad about his death. Even today when people remember him, they
tell my father: That death was unjust. He never would have had anything
to do with the enemy.

My brother fought for years. The struggle was his heart and soul. He would
never have had anything to do with the other side.

And you know the girl who got my brother killed... She is still around.
Shes one of those women who like to play her men dirty and then pit
them against each other.

To this day, the grief that Carmen's kin carry with them is sullied by public
suspicion that the murder may have been justified. Her family was marginalized
by the guerilla organization and was still distrusted six years after the signing
of the armistice when I made my last visit to the former war zone. Nonetheless,
Carmens family continued to support the revolution. Indeed, four of Carmen's
other brothers and one of her sisters remained guerilla fighters even after
the assassination of their oldest brother. Three of these brothers subsequently
died in combat and the fourth now suffers from convulsions, partial paralysis
and severe psychological disorders due to shrapnel lodged in his skull.

There is yet another explanation for why Carmen received no land from the guerilla
organizations at the end of the civil war even though she was a former guerilla
fighter and should have been given land according to the local terms of the
peace agreement. It illuminates the way gender power relations under rural patriarchy
fuel the coalescence of political, structural and symbolic violence to render
even more natural the personal aggression that constitute everyday violence.
This third version for Carmens landlessness is more of an accusation which
is repeated shamefully by Carmen's friends and aggressively by Carmen's detractors:
The commanders did not like her because she is a woman who liked to go
with a lot of men. In other words, Carmen was believed to have had too
many boyfriends during the armed struggle. Unfortunately for her, two of the
fathers of her five children died in combat and cannot defend her sexual honor
during peacetime.

The accusation that Carmen did not deserve land because she
was promiscuous resulted in her being unable to support five children in her
home village after the war ended. She was thus forced to migrate illegally to
the United States, hiking through the southwest U.S. desertat one point
chased by police dogsin search of the livelihood denied to her in El Salvador.
She now sends checks of $50 to $100 each month to the two different families
back home to whom she entrusted her five children before leaving for the United
States. Carmens deepest pain, far worse than the physical pain she still
feels from the shrapnel embedded in her spine and from her other bodily ailments
(migraines, ulcer and repetitive strain injury), is the shame and sorrow of
having abandoned her children, and of dividing them up
for safekeeping. Carmens sorrow is also patterned by patriarchal preferences
of motherly love:

My son was four when I left, and you should see how smart he is. He's got
the sharpest mind.

I used to put him up on the table to try to conscienticize him little by
little about my leaving. I would bathe him and then I would wrap him on a
towel and sit him on the edge of the table and I would say to him, "Papa,
I'm gonna be going to the Statesbecause I used to call him "Papa."
And I would tell him, "From over there I'm gonna send you a bicycle."
I would tell him that to make him feel better. But he would tell me, "No
mommy, don't go. You, I really love you.

And then... and this is what hurts me most, these words of my son: He would
tell me, "Don't go, mommy. I really love you. If you go I'm gonna go
deep into the mountains and cry for you." That's what he would tell me.

And then, Felipe, when I gave him to Marcos's mother [putting her hand on
Marcos, her husband's shoulder], and this is something that I always tell
Marcos, that I can't forget this--that moment when I gave away my son. Felipe,
I had to rip him off me with force... You see he was grabbing me right here.
[Patting her thighs] Grabbing my skirt. And he was telling me, pleading, "Mama,
don't leave me. Mama!" And so what I did was, I pushed him away with
force and I gave him to Marcos's mother, right there. Right there in the central
park.

I'm telling you, that boy! I'm hurting for him in my soul too much. I can't
talk about this any more because then afterwards, I can't bear it. I start
crying.

Marcos tells me, "Carmen, don't feel sad." "But how am I
supposed to not feel sad?" I tell him back. My nerves are out of control
because of the loss of my children. Marcos tells me, "Look Carmen, think
clearly. One day, God willing, you'll get your papers-- that's my immigration
papers. And he tells me, "I'll do everything I can to help you get those
papers."

I got these pictures of my son and you can see that he's sad. Just standing
there alone in a tree. He's very sad there and I look at it and I think that
he looks just like a little adult, person. And that's what hurts me most--seeing
him alone, a tiny little creature, so smart. Here, [handing me an envelope
full of photographs] let me show you. My poor creature. Look at the poor little
boy. [Waving one of the photos] Look at him Felipe, there he is--all alone--look
at him Felipe: look how sad he is.

Carmen burst into tears on another one of my visits to her boarding house in
San Francisco. She had just received a letter from the family to whom she had
entrusted her eldest daughter informing her that the thirteen-year-old girl
had ran away to Honduras. Her middle daughter who is eleven had also run away,
but to the capital of El Salvador where she was now staying with cousins. Once
again, Carmen follows patriarchal logic in favoring her eldest son while resigning
herself to suffer for all of them, as only a mother can.

Aie Felipe, what can I do? Now my children are scattered all over and I'm
here. Courage in war was easy. I'm talking now about the pain a mother feels
for her children. A mother pains for her son, Felipe.

You can't do anything about a mother's pain. No one can do anything about
a mother's pain. I won't forget my son--never, ever.

And he's such a little boy. That boy I'm telling you that he hurts my soul--too
much. Damn the day I came to this damn country. Damn this country that
sent so many bullets and bombs against us!

But Carmen also likes to dance and her partner does not, so she goes out on
Saturday nights by herself. The result is physical fights between Carmen and
her companion. Luckily, her seventeen-year-old younger sister moved up from
El Salvador to live with them in their seven-and-a-half square meter boarding-house
room. She called the police during their last confrontation. Marcos had knocked
Carmen down and she had picked up a machete and was chasing him around the small,
cluttered space with the hard practiced swings of one who has worked for years
as an agricultural laborer in El Salvador. Carmen cannot escape everyday violence
in her attempt to recreate a new conjugal household in the United States.

My field notes over the years contain numerous references to the ways violence
follows gendered fault lines and becomes an accepted way to solve community
anxieties in wartime. These notes were written during the summer of 1995 four
years after the signing of the peace treaty in El Salvador:

August 1994:

I invited two families of former guerilla fighters over to my home in San
Francisco to look through the photos I had taken of them in 1981 during the
military invasion while we were all fleeing for our lives. They now live in
Oakland. The men work cleaning offices in San Francisco's financial district
and the women clean houses in Oakland. When I showed them a photograph of
a mutual friend taken in a refugee camp in Honduras in 1983 two years after
the invasion they fell silent.

The woman in the photograph had been active in the guerilla-sponsored women's
mass organization and had composed songs in the refugee camps in Honduras
during the early 1980s denouncing the Salvadoran military repression and celebrating
the participation of women in the ongoing revolutionary struggle. She had
either lost her husband in the fighting or had separated from him. In any
case, she was a single mother supporting several children independently. Towards
the end of the war in approximately 1987, she had returned from the Honduran
refugee camps to her village in El Salvador. It was a resettlement sponsored
by the guerilla organizations, which in defiance of the Salvadoran military
were attempting to repopulate deserted war zones with their families to create
a base of civilian supporters.

I innocently asked my friends how this mutual friend of ours was doing,
and where she now lived. There were a few nervous giggles. Max attempted to
crack a bitter joke that I did not understand and no one else seemed to appreciate:
Mala yerba hay que cortarla [Weeds must be cut].He tried
to laugh, but merely croaked. His wife's eyes welled with tears. "That's
what they used to tell us: weeds must be cut," he repeated somewhat defensively.
I mumbled awkwardly that I was sorry to hear that our friend was dead. We
changed the subject.

Later someone explained to me in private that this friend had been mistakenly
accused of being a Salvadoran military spy and had been murdered in 1988.
The reason she had been suspected was that, as a single mother without a husband
to help support her four children, she had earned her income during those
precarious years at the end of the war by traveling to the capital controlled
by the Salvadoran military to sell ice cream in the central plaza. To reach
the municipal capital, every day she was obliged to pass a military checkpoint.
Few people in the resettled guerilla-controlled village where she lived were
able to cross these checkpoints without being captured, tortured and/or killed
by the government forces. It was soon rumored that she had a boyfriend in
the municipal capital who was a member of a government-sponsored death squad.
It was then suspected that she was providing him with information on what
was occurring in her home village where everyone supported the guerillas and
where the army still tried to kill people in periodic military sweeps and
aerial bombardments. The mere suspicion that she was a sapo
(spy) sufficed for the local guerilla commander in her village to order the
woman killed during those volatile final years of government repression and
undercover infiltration.

Ten years later everyone recognizes that her "ajusticimiento
(justice killing) was an unfortunate error. Her death-squad boyfriend may
indeed have arranged for her to be able to pass the military checkpoint during
the final years of the war, but it was clear that she had never provided him
with any militarily useful information that placed her fellow villagers at
risk. In point of fact, it is now rumored that she had not even liked her
military death-squad boyfriend. She had merely been manipulating him for permission
to enter the militarily-controlled town in order to support herself by selling
ice cream.

But of course this information arrives too late. Her children were forced
to grow up as orphans in the village that killed their mother. They are still
there today. José tells me that the oldest girl who was twelve at the
time of her mothers killing, was lucky: A nice man in the
villageone of the fighters in his squadronadopted her and they
now live as a couple [juntado].

The Cold War in Academia

Writing about repression and resistance in the Salvadoran civil war for the
American Anthropological Association meetings in 1992, I would not have known
how to deal with Carmens experience or with the story of the killing of
my friend the ice-cream seller, followed by the sexualized adoption of her orphaned
daughter by a guerilla fighter. I am not sure that I could even have heard these
accounts--much less have tape-recorded them and written them up in my fieldnotes.
Even as late as 1992, Salvadorans who had been supportive of the FMLN during
the 1980s may not have discussed internal killings with me. Indeed, I have hesitated
publishing this account for several years after presenting it at an academic
conference in Canada in 1997 (Bourgois, 1997). I was worried that this new data
might fan smoldering embers of Cold War rhetoric akin to the work of the anthropologist
David Stoll (1999). Stoll almost obsessively attempts to discredit the personal
testimony of Rigoberta Menchú (1984), the Quiche Maya activist who won
the Nobel Peace Prize for her powerful denunciation of the murder of her family
and the destruction of her natal village by Guatemalan government troops in
the 1980s (Menchú, 1984). It has spawned a voluminous but ultimately
trivial ideological debate.

A decade ago, I knew very well how to deal intellectually, emotionally and politically
with the fact of machine guns shooting into the sound of crying babies in the
darkness of night. With special care, I documented the human rights violations
of civilians by the Salvadoran government military. The killing of some 75,000
people in El Salvador during the 1980s was directly attributable to U.S. military,
economic, and logistical support for the Salvadoran army. There is no pre- or
post-Cold War questioning of that fact. Of the 22,000 denunciations of human
rights violations investigated by the United Nations Truth Commission only 5%
were found to have been committed by the FMLN compared to 85% by the army and
10% by army-linked death squads (Binford, 1996: 117).

In the 1980s, my understanding of the political violence generated by U.S. foreign
policy was further truncated by the fact that my attempts to write on it and
to publicize it came up against the neo-McCarthyism that pervaded public debate.
Popular unrest in Central America was widely suspected of being the result of
calculated communist machinations. This built-in censorship operated routinely
not only in the media but in academe as well: when I gave a press conference
in 1981 describing the killing of civilians in the counterinsurgency campaign
I had witnessed, my university's anthropology department put me on formal academic
trial and considered expelling me for what it called unethical professional
behavior (Bourgois, 1991). After I testified before the U.S. Congress
on how military aid and U.S. military trainers were assisting in the slaughter
of civilians in El Salvador, the Central Intelligence Agency circulated a report
to the members of Congress who had listened to me depicting me as a communist
propagandist for the FLMN guerillas (U.S. Congress, 1982).8 I was advised by
a sympathetic congressional aide at my human rights briefings to cease showing
my photograph of a baby born on the fifth day of our flight.

PHOTO 5: Admiring a newly delivered baby on the fifth
day of our flight. The baby survived and was carried as a refugee into Honduras
six days later.

The hand-inscribed insignia on the baseball cap of the woman cradling the newborn
was the acronym for one of the factions of the FMLN guerilla coalition. The
aide warned me that this reduced the credibility of my claim that the photograph
depicted innocent civilians.

In this Cold War atmosphere, it was difficult for me to perceive and portray
the revolutionary Salvadoran peasants as anything less than innocent victims,
at worst, or as noble resistors at best. The urgency of documenting and denouncing
state violence and military repression blinded me to the internecine everyday
violence embroiling the guerillas and undermining their internal solidarity.
As a result I could not understand the depth of the trauma that political violence
imposes on its targets, even those mobilized to resist it. This is not to deny,
however, that the peasants also took pride in mobilizing in support of the FMLN
to demand their rights (cf. Wood 2000).

Beyond a Pornography of Violence

In Pascalian Meditations, Bourdieu (1997:233) warns
that the particularly degrading effects of symbolic violence, in particular
that exerted against stigmatized populations,... makes it... difficult to talk
about the dominated in an accurate and realistic way without seeming either
to crush them or exalt them. He identifies the inclination to violence
that is engendered by early and constant exposure to violence as one
of the most tragic effects of the condition of the dominated and notes
that the active violence of people is often [directed against]
ones own companions in misfortune. And he sketches the following
causal chain:

The violence exerted everyday in families, factories, workshops,
banks, offices, police stations, prisons, even hospitals and schools... is,
in the last analysis, the product of the inert violence of
economic structures and social mechanisms relayed by the active violence of
people. (Bourdieu, 1997: 233, emphasis added)

Bourdieu posits a law of the conservation of violence and goes on,
in his more political writings, to warn of the predictable fallout of the ongoing
neoliberal assault on the European welfare state:

You cannot cheat with the law of the conservation of violence: all
violence is paid for... The structural violence exerted by the financial markets,
in the form of layoffs, loss of security, etc., is matched sooner or later
in the form of suicides, crime and delinquency, drug addiction, alcoholism,
a whole host of minor and major everyday acts of violence. (Bourdieu, 1998:
40, original emphasis)

Political, economic, and institutional forces shape micro-interpersonal and
emotional interactions in all kinds of ways by supporting or suppressing modes
of feeling and manifestations of love or aggression, definitions of respect
and achievement, and patterns of insecurity and competition. In post-Cold War,
end-of-the-century Latin America, neoliberalism actively dynamizes everyday
violence. Javier Auyero (2000), for example, sees a verification of Bourdieus
law of the conservation of violence in the linkages he has unearthed between
the restructuring of Argentinas deregulated economy and the rise of predatory
delinquency and substance abuse in the shantytowns of Buenos Aires. In the United
States, the fusing of structural and symbolic violence produces especially destructive
but persistent patterns of interpersonal violence that reinforce the legitimacy
of social inequality. Racism, unemployment, economic exploitation, and infrastructural
decay are exacerbated by the indignity of being a poor person of color in a
white, Protestant-dominated country that is the richest in the world. This nourishes
among the excluded an angry sense of inferiority that results in acts of self-destructive
or communal violence which in turn further fuel a cycle of humiliation and demobilizing
self-blame. Out of this dynamics grows an oppositional, inner-city street cultureespecially
among youththat fills the vacuum left by unemployment, underemployment
and social disinvestment. This oppositional culture arises in an attempt to
resist subordination but actually mimics with classic all-American energy the
most savage elements of U.S. neo-liberal ideology through its celebration of
ostentatious individual material gain, masculine domination, commodity fetishism
and a racialized understanding of hierarchy.9

Unlike the post-Cold War debates over political repression in Central America,
however, debates about poverty and race in the United States continue to stagnate
in bipolar conceptions of the worthy versus unworthy poor (Katz, 1996). In U.S.
policy discourse, inner-city residents must be constructed as moral citizens
(who practice safe sex, avoid drugs, refrain from violence, and toil diligently
at subordinate jobs) in order to deserve shelter, food, medical care, employment,
and a modicum of public respect. Should they fail to abide by these behavioral
dictates, they are blamed for producing their own material distress. The centrality
of structural violence in this process becomes obscured by a maelstrom of everyday
violence (expressed as criminal and domestic aggression) that in turn propagates
a symbolic violence which convinces the dominated that they are to blameat
least partiallyfor the destitution and destruction visited upon them.

Everyday violence is a solvent of human integrity. Through gripping descriptions,
harrowing photographs and seductive poetics, ethnographers risk contributing
to a pornography of violence that reinforces negative perceptions of subordinated
groups in the eyes of unsympathetic readers when they analyze it. But, conversely,
the imperative of painting positive portraits of the inner-city poor in the
United States or of revolutionary guerillas in El Salvador diminishes the real
human devastation wrought by political repression in war and by political-economic
inequality under neo-liberal capitalism. People do not simply survive
violence as if it somehow remained outside of them, and they are rarely if ever
ennobled by it. Those who confront violence with resistancewhether it
be cultural or politicaldo not escape unscathed from the terror and oppression
they rise up against. The challenge of ethnography, then, is to check the impulse
to sanitize and instead to clarify the chains of causality that link structural,
political, and symbolic violence in the production of an everyday violence that
buttresses unequal power relations and distorts efforts at resistance. In the
post-Cold War era, a better understanding of these complex linkages is especially
important because it is international market forces rather than politically
driven repression or armed resistance that is waging war for the hearts and
minds of populations.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank the families of the revolutionary peasants in El Salvador who welcomed
me into their lives and allowed me to learn from them. I am indebted to Paul
Willis and especially to Loïc Wacquant for the careful critical readings
they provided on several successive drafts of this article (I have never had
journal editors provide such detailed, insightful comments). Loïc deserves
co-authorship on this article, except that he is uncomfortable with some of
my analytical imprecision. Fieldwork in the U.S. inner city that made possible
the reinterpretation of my Salvadoran materials was funded by the National Institute
on Drug Abuse (R03-DA06413-01 and R01-DA10164), the University of California
AIDS Research Program, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage
Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Social
Science Research Council, and the U.S. Census Bureau.

vuelve 1. Galtung defines structural
violence as the indirect violence built into repressive social orders
creating enormous differences between potential and actual human self-realization.
He specifically differentiates structural violence from institutional violence,
emphasizing the formers more abstract nature... that can[not] be
traced down to a particular institution. Structural violence is often
seen as... natural as the air around us The general formula behind
structural violence is inequality, above all in the distribution of power
(Galtung, 1975:173, 175)..

vuelve 2. The battalion conducting
this military offensive under the leadership of Colonel Sigfrido Ochoa included
members of the Atlacatl Brigade trained by the United States Army. According
to a United Press International Report, Ochoa took 15 reporters along
a path covered with foul-smelling remains of cows, pigs and horses. This
would have been the day after most of us managed to escape from the zone into
Honduras. Ochoa told the reporters that he had burned the cadavers of the 250
guerillas he claimed his troops killed guerillas he claimed his troops killed
to avoid an epidemic (Afirman Tropas del Gobierno que Mataron
a 250 Guerrilleros y sólo Sufrieron 15 Bajas, Diario las Américas,
November 21, 1981, p. 1).

vuelve 3. This was a recognize
echo of Oscar Lewiss (1970:75) findings during fieldwork in Cuba just
after the 1959 revolution: The people had a new sense of power and importance.
They were armed and were given a doctrine, which glorified the lower class as
the hope of humanity. (I was told by one Cuban official that they had practically
eliminated delinquency by giving arms to the delinquents!). The novels
of Manlio Argueta (1983, 1987) on the Salvadoran revolutionary struggle powerfully
evoke the metamorphosis of the Salvadoran peasants from victims of both physical
repression and symbolic violence in the early repressive phase of political
ferment into a dignified army of the poor actively fighting for their rights.

vuelve 4. This interpretation
of symbolic violence under extreme conditions sheds light on the phenomenon
of survivor guilt among Nazi Holocaust victims. It might also help explain the
so-called Stockholm Syndrome whereby hostages begin to identify with the cause
of their raptors, as in the high-profile case of Patty Hearst and the Symbionese
Liberation Army in San Francisco in 1974.

vuelve 5. Note the combination
of both a question mark and an exclamation point in the title of the edited
volume by Ana Kelly Rivera (1995) collecting the testimonies of women fighters
and survivors of military repression in El Salvador: ¡¿Valió
la pena?! [Was it worth it? It was worth it!].

vuelve 6. In the March 2000
national elections, the FMLN won 38% of the congressional seats, more than any
other political party (Wallace, 2000:50 fn 3).

vuelve 7. Joaquin Villalobos,
a leading military commander of the FMLN, is said to have been responsible for
Roque Dalton's killing. Following the armistice Villalobos became a member of
the Salvadoran National Assembly for a brief period and, in the early 1990s,
he formed occasional strategic voting alliances with ARENA, the right-wing party
that represented the ruling oligarchy and had organic ties with the death squads.

vuelve 8. A year later a group
of Democratic congresspersons released a report critiquing the excesses committed
by the CIA. One of the half-dozen examples they listed was the inaccurate claim
by the CIA that a Stanford anthropology graduate student was an FMLN guerilla
agent. According to this report, the CIA had presented materials to the
U.S. Congress Committee on Intelligence Oversight that were intended to
shoot down Bourgois claims, including a slide that presented
the newspaper op-ed piece quoted the opening vignette to this article as an
item of guerilla propaganda (U.S. Congress, 1982).

vuelve 9. Gangsta rap
music resonates especially well with the American Dream of rugged
individualism and entrepreneurship spiced by everyday violence. More generally,
millenarian cultural nationalist movements among oppressed minorities in the
United States can be understood as an exorcism of the symbolic violence of racialized
social hierarchies. Movements such as the Ghost Dance religion on Native American
reservations in the latter half of the 19th century or Farrakhans Nation
of Islam among imprisoned African Americans in the late 20th century provide
symbolic catharsis by inverting the insult of internalized racism.

Arnson, Cynthia, 2000: Window on the Past: A Declassified History
of Death Squads in El Salvador in Campbell, Bruce and Arthur Brenner
(eds.), 2000: Death Squads in Global Perspective: Murder with Deniability.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 85-124.

Bourdieu, Pierre and Loïc Wacquant, 1992: An Invitation to Reflexive
Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bourgois, Philippe, 1997: The Pornography of Violence: Fieldwork in
El Salvador and the U.S. Inner City, paper presented at the plenary
session of the Canadian Anthropology Society/Congress of Learned Societies,
St. John's, Newfoundland, June 13.

Bourgois, Philippe (1992) The Pornography of Violence: Fieldwork in
El Barrio and Beyond, paper presented at the 91st Annual Meetings of
the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, December 2-6.